“Athletes should measure their training success not by how many hours they log, nor by how wide a sweat pool they can produce in dark and dank basements, but instead by how fast they ride when they eventually take to the roads come spring.”
Another cold and dark winter looms
just around the corner. Athletes from
the northern latitudes are busy preparing their video stockpiles in an effort
to combat the impending mind and butt-numbing indoor cycling sessions they feel
they have no choice but to endure if they are to be competitive in the season
to come.
Many of these same athletes will
follow the rote script of building base with low intensity training where the
only training variable is ever increasing volume. Thus, as the winter gets longer and darker, the bounds of these
athletes’ sanity is continually pushed to the limit. Rote base formulas insist that they have no choice but to keep
doing more…and more still, for this is the only way to build base.
Might there be another way to build proverbial base in the
dark of winter?
Yes! For more than a dozen years both myself and a growing cadre of
coached adults who eat Frosted Flakes, train more purposefully, and feel GREAT!
Indeed, there are few athletes or
coaches who are greater advocates of indoor bike performance training than
myself. In fact, I will not coach you
if you do not have an indoor trainer.
However, my athletes effectively
build winter base through concise
indoor training sessions that last on average one hour. I would never prescribe a 3 hour indoor base-building session for there are
other ways to build base that are more effective, less time-consuming, and much
more interesting than the tedium that 2-4 hour indoor slog-a-thons watching the
same videos over and over again represent.
I confess to having first discovered the expansive benefits of indoor performance training by a fluke, and whose circumstances you can read below under Genesis. Short version is that I got stuck in Boston in the winter of 1991, could not stomach riding for more than an hour indoors, had the circumstance of having my very first ride outdoors in many months be a tough 70 mile ride in Spain where I rode inexplicably well, took the time to ponder just how that ride was possible, and then revisited the indoor concept and studied it for the next dozen years. See Genesis below for more detail.
Couple the above circumstances with a belief system that tells me if something isn’t fun and interesting it isn’t optimal, along with not wanting basic convention to limit my training options, I allowed instinct and open-minded observation to guide me in exploring ways to maximize performance.
Thus, over the years I have
crafted a wide variety of performance enhancing, yet time-efficient training progressions. The effectiveness of these progressions has
been proven time and again by the hundreds of athletes that I have
coached. My athletes will be the first
to tell you that training smart with the methods I have developed produces the
following benefits:
·
Allows them to train far less
than what is generally recommended, thus alleviating the stress of cramming
training into a week with too few hours, only to finish frustrated by an
inability to do so.
·
Sees them improving
performance relative to previous years training with volume-based methods.
·
Makes training fun! The workouts offer both variety and
challenge, such that you can save your Tour de France tapes for afterwards
while sitting in a comfortable chair.
So why is the program I describe
so unique in general training quarters?
Three reasons come to my mind:
1. Unfamiliarity with the
medium.
Most top
coaches and/or athletes will have largely trained optimally in warm weather climes where the thought of indoor
training would not present itself, other than as a rainy day sub-optimal
fallback option. Thus, they have not
had the opportunity to explore a different medium as I have done exhaustively
for more than a dozen years.
2.
The ideas I present challenge convention, traditional
training pyramids, flowcharts, etc.
Too much
of what passes as coaching these days is simply passing on age-old formulas
whose basis is that’s the way it’s always been done.
3.
Failure to see Triathlon as its own sport.
Traditional
base-building models are built on the idea of one sport. Triathlon combines training for 3 sports and
whose crossover effect accelerates building the base engine.
Of course there will always be people that disagree with the concepts I am describing. However, I doubt that those that disagree have had first-hand experience in the methodology of applying the principles I advocate, much less have successfully implemented this proven method with countless athletes of all abilities.
In short, their only frame of reference is if one were to do less of the same kind of monotone training the results would be a poorer performance, and this would likely be true. The key is to change the way you train, not simply to train less.
So, if you live in Maine or Minnesota, and are determined to ride for endless hours indoors to build base, go ahead and do so. But be aware that there are far more thoughtful ways to train, and which make base building more fun, less time-consuming, and ultimately more effective. The athletes that I coach will already know this and will use the extra time balance their other training and life matters.
Afterall, athletes should measure their training success not by how many hours they log, nor by how wide a sweat pool they can produce in dark and dank basements, but instead by how fast they ride when they take to the roads.
Michael McCormack is a
two-time Ironman Canada Champion and has been coaching athletes since
1994. You can read more about Michael’s
programs at www.triathloncoach.com.
Related articles that
might be of interest are Rethinking Base Training, and Training Backward, the
Pyramid Turned Upside Down.
The genesis of my indoor training
sanity revelation dates to 1991 when I was unable to return to my winter
training quarters in sunny Spain.
Instead, it was me and my blackburn windtrainer in my Boston Back Bay
living room. It was a particularly
nasty winter that year and whereas I do not enjoy being cold on the bike, much less
dealing with combative Boston drivers unaccustomed to seeing cyclists in
winter, I road indoors exclusively from January to April.
My indoor sessions were generally
about one hour duration and involved experimenting with a variety of fairly
intense workouts in order to stave off boredom. My longest indoor ride was 2hrs and I did this only once. In fact, that 2hr exercise in tedium remains
my longest indoor ride to this very day.
When a back injury that had
prevented me from running was finally cured, I flew to Spain in early April
where I was anxious to get back to training outdoors in the company of
professional and semi-pro riders. My very
first ride in Madrid turned out to be a 70mile hilly ride in the company of
semi-pro riders, a seeming certain recipe for disaster considering that my
average ride duration for the past 3 months was 1-hour.
Much to my surprise, not only did
I endure the 70 miles, but I rode very strongly throughout, despite my complete
lack of “base.” Shocked and quite pleasantly
surprised at this ride, I remember thinking that there clearly must be
something of extra value to training indoors.
Nevertheless, now that I was in sunny Spain with its challenging roads,
I could now take my cycling to an even higher level.
Two months
later, I found myself noticeably slower than when I had arrived, despite an
abundance of miles and good riding partners.
Hmm, what had changed?
And so it was
that in the month of June, I searched Madrid’s bike shops for a
windtrainer. My Spanish friends could
not help laughing at this American who traveled to Spain to ride indoors twice
a week.
It was this same crazy American
that was to have the last laugh when I leaped from anonymity to winning Ironman
Canada that same year, breaking the bike record and defeating many of the
sport’s top IM athletes in the process.
Something about that indoor training…
Since that eye-opening and
career-changing year in 1991, I used the windtrainer and subsequently a
computrainer as a year ‘round laboratory with which to experiment, test, and
evaluate different workouts and training progressions.